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Financial Crimes
Knights Templar
The Order of the Knights Templar (Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon) was founded in 1118 to protect Christians on pilgrimage to Jerusalem (Blacktorne, 2011). The Order was sanctioned by King Baldwin II of Jerusalem and he quartered the nine original knights in the old stables at the Temple of Solomon. All members had to give over all of their wealth and goods to the Order and take vows of poverty, chastity, piety, and obedience just like other monks (Langue, 2011). A majority of the members joined for life, although a select few were also allowed to join for specific duration.
The Templars' were considered the first international banking organizations. Although this wasn't there specific title they charge a fee (interest) for issuing letters of deposits (checks). Some also view them as a multinational corporation; however the banking reference seems to hold more credibility. There financial crimes dealt primarily with usury (Middle Ages, N.d.). Usury can be defined as the practice of enriching yourself by lending money and charging either interest or a fixed fee to do so. Though this is common today, at the time it was deeply frowned upon. The Knights Templars eventually amassed such an enormous fortune with their international operations that they were charged with treason by the king, Philip IV of France. Once the French army turned on the Order, the members were either killed or fled.
2- The Fuggers
The Fuggers were a German merchant and banking family. In the 16th century, they were the reigning masters of the universe (Stadler, 2011). The Fuggers bankrolled some of Europe's greatest empires. Some analysts rate their political influence as comparable to the Medici in Italy, but their wealth was matched only by the Rothschilds' over a century later. Originally, they were merchants of fine clothing. But they also diversified into banking in the 15th century. Their closest dealings were with the Habsburg family, which provided mining rights as securities against loans from the merchants. When the Habsburgs repeatedly defaulted on their loans, the Fuggers gained an effective monopoly in mining and the trading of silver, copper, and mercury across...
In 1546, Anton Fugger and sons had a working capital of millions of guilders; the highest in the firm's history. However, he had intentions of dismantling operations and spread the money throughout the family. But another family member picked up the slack and brought banking back to prominence. Later, when Spain defaulted on a loan, it left the Fugger family in a weakened position (Sanello, 2010). From that point on, the basically operated a Ponzi scheme to keep things going. They basically borrowed money to meet their obligations for a time, until all operations finally collapsed.
3- The Rothschild's
The founder of the family was considered to be Mayer Amschel (Forbes Staff, 2005). The family's name derived from the red (rot) shield on the house in the ghetto in which Mayer's ancestors had once lived. Intended for the church, Mayer studied in school briefly, but his parents' early death forced him into an apprenticeship in a banking house (History, N.d.). Mayer was the originator of the sets of patterns that his family was to follow so successfully for so centuries up until the present day; to do business with reigning families by preference and to father as many sons as possible who could take care of the family's many business affairs abroad.
The family has been a source of countless conspiracy theories for many centuries as well and this trend continues to the present day. In fact, it is hard to find credible sources because all of the various conspiracy theories flood the searches. These theories have differing claims, such as claiming that the family belongs to the Illuminati, controls the world's wealth and financial institutions or encouraged wars between governments (Brustein, 2003). The later theory seems to hold the most weight among sources; that they have become very profitable from different wars. Many families, the Rothschild's included, financed companies that sold and funded various parts of the Allied Forces as well as the Nazi armies in WWII; though little is known about exactly how much influence they exerted.
4- The Medicis of…
6- BCCI "Bank of Credit and Commerce International
The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a major international bank founded in 1972 by Agha Hasan Abedi, a Pakistani financier. The Bank was registered in Luxembourg. It operated in 78 countries, had over 400 branches, and had assets in excess of twenty billion making it the seventh largest private bank in the world by assets (Kanas, 2005). In the late 1980's BCCI became the target of a two-year undercover operation conducted by the U.S. Customs Service. This operation concluded with a fake wedding that was attended by BCCI officers and drug dealers from around the world who had established a personal friendship and working relationship with undercover Special Agent Robert Mazur (Lohr, 1991).
After a six-month trial in Tampa, some of the key bank officers were convicted and received lengthy prison sentences. BCCI came under the scrutiny of regulatory bodies and intelligence agencies in the 1980s due to its perceived avoidance of falling under one regulatory banking authority. It was actually set up to be not under any regulatory bodies' control at all. Thus the international bank could help people who wanted to hide money from taxation or even launder money. The true extents of the ties with other banking institutions were never fully uncovered. The prosecutors claimed that they busted the largest money laundering system ever yet many reports at the time feel like they barely scratched the surface (Baquet, 1991).
Not all the Knights perished, however. Some, still in the Holy Land, never returned to Europe. Others escaped, and some even joined other Holy Orders. The Order did mount a powerful defense, and in fear the men might gain public sympathy, the French government executed 54 of them by publicly burning them at the stake. A few were found innocent, and these men received pensions. Some were punished by remaining
A favorite target for conspiracists today as well as in the past, a group of European intellectuals created the Order of the Illuminati in May 1776, in Bavaria, Germany, under the leadership of Adam Weishaupt (Atkins, 2002). In this regard, Stewart (2002) reports that, "The 'great' conspiracy organized in the last half of the eighteenth century through the efforts of a number of secret societies that were striving for
In addition, both governments and churches began to grow suspicious of the group, probably because of the "organization's secrecy and liberal religious beliefs" (Watson, 2009). As a result, Portugal and France banned Freemasonry; in fact, it was a capital offense to be a Freemason in Portugal (Watson, 2009). Moreover, "Pope Clement XII forbade Catholics from becoming Freemasons on penalty of excommunication" (Watson, 2009). Feeling pressure in Europe, many Freemasons